The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement

We (Parker and Tom) recently coauthored a paper, “The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement”, with 7 other economists. The paper walks through a series of simple models of how AI may accelerate AI R&D, and we thought it’s worth highlighting some context and takeaways:

We care about Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) because we want to forecast capabilities. METR’s priority is to assess risk from frontier AI development, and one input is how capable AI systems will be in the future. Capabilities have been growing rapidly over the past 5 years, and we want to know whether to expect an acceleration. 1

The term RSI has been used with very different definitions. Unfortunately a lot of confusion has been caused by different definitions of RSI. Everyone agrees that RSI refers to feedback from…